“No, not always,” the woman admitted, in English. “I have seldom been generous towards my own sex. I was, it is true, Liane, until recently, your enemy,” she added, in a sympathetic tone. “I should be now if it were not for recent events.”
“You intend, then, to prove my friend,” Liane gasped excitedly, half-rising from her chair. “You—you will say nothing.”
“On the contrary, I shall speak the truth.”
“Ah, no,” she wailed. “No, spare me that. Think! Think! surely my lot is hard enough to bear! Already I have lost George, the man I love.”
“Your loss is my gain,” Mariette Lepage said slowly. “You have lost a lover, while I have found a husband.”
“And you will marry him—you?” she cried, dismayed.
“I know what are your thoughts,” the other said. “My reputation is unenviable—eh?”
Liane did not answer; her lover sat rigid and silent.
“Well,” went on the woman known at the tables as “The Golden Hand,” “I cannot deny it. All that you see here, my house, my furniture, my pictures, the very clothes I wear, I have won fairly at the tables, because—well, because I am, I suppose, one of the fortunate ones. Others sit and ruin themselves by unwise play, while I sit beside them and prosper. Because of that, I am pointed out by men and women as a kind of extraordinary species, and shunned by all save the professional players to whom you and I belong. But,” she added, gazing meaningly at Liane, “you know my past as well as I know yours.”
The words caused her to turn pale as death, while her breath came and went quickly. She was in momentary dread lest a single word of the terrible truth she was striving to hide should involuntarily escape her.